Correspondence:

Please be professional, courteous, and kind when corresponding with me or your peers via email. I do my best to respond to emails quickly from Monday to Friday but do not expect instant replies. If I have not responded in 72 hours, please resend the email.

Please include your full name and section number in the email title as I teach multiple sections. It’s best to bundle multiple queries into one organized email rather than sending each query in an individual email. If what you need to speak about requires substantive discussion, I highly recommend you make an appointment with me here.

Late Work Policy:

All assignments are due before the class of the specified day EST. Extensions for papers are not routinely granted. If you have serious and extenuating circumstances (a medical, climate, or family emergency), you may reach out to me prior to the deadline to discuss a potential arrangement or accommodation.

If your work is submitted late (up to one week/seven calendar days) without a prior check-in or arrangement, it will be eligible to earn no higher than a C grade. You can still earn most of the credit as long as you’re submitting work that meets the assignment goals.

You will automatically receive a zero for your assignment if it is still unsubmitted 7 days after the deadline.

Academic Integrity:

You are at this university, presumably, because you like to think and sharing your intellectual and creative ideas in productive ways is vital to your growth as a scholar. The most important vice in anything you produce must be your own. We all take inspiration from the work of others—it’s an essential part of your endeavors—but it is imperative that you cite anything that did not originate with you. Hunter College regards acts of academic dishonesty (e.g., plagiarism, cheating on examinations, obtaining unfair advantage, and falsification of records and official documents) as serious offenses against the values of intellectual honesty. The College is committed to enforcing CUNY Policy on Academic Integrity and will pursue cases of academic dishonesty according to the Hunter College Academic Integrity Procedures.

I reserve the right to scan all assignments through plagiarism detection software at my discretion. If you are unsure about whether you should cite something, please check with me.

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Your final grade for the course is comprised of the following components:

In this course we will be using a form of what has become known as “ungrading.”  More appropriately, however, it should be called “alternative assessment.”

Extensive research has shown that grading is often prohibitive of deeper learning and reinforces existing biases and injustices. Materials on this will be on our course site and discussed in further detail – to start you may wish to read: https://tinyurl.com/7h2j2udy. In choosing to give consistent qualitative feedback and not assign letter grades, I hope to encourage you to engage with this course more deeply and without consideration of a final point outcome. Hunter College does require a final grade for the course, which you will determine and then explain to me why you deserve it. You are in control of your final grade, but you must earn it. I will send out two self-evaluation surveys throughout the semester, one during the midterm, the other after the final creative project presentation. Based on your self-evaluations and my observation, I will update your final grade of this course on Blackboard. I will also give your 24-hour-window before I submit your grade to the department, during which feel free to schedule a zoom talk with me if you have any questions regarding the final grade.

25% Participation

Participation is based on the 1) attendance, 2)contribution to the discussion, and 3) in-class facilitation. Please come to the discussion section prepared with notes and questions. Your contribution could be questions about the learning materials, thoughtful responses to your classmates, etc. Please reach out to me individually if you prefer other ways of communication, alternatives are welcomed. If you miss more than FOUR sections (without arranging for other access/credit for participation if you are sick or have another emergency), you automatically fail the class, as no participation grade will be possible.

25% Five Short Responses

For every 2-3 weeks, I will give your a prompt to help you think through the materials. Please write 250-word response to the assigned readings, videos and post on the Commons before the class. Facilitators will summarize the responses and facilitate the conversation in the class.

25% Performance Review

Based upon your viewing or attending experience, write a 900 to 1000 words, well-organized paper, with a clear thesis and development of ideas, supported by examples, in which you address the following: What is remarkable about the performance or production in its creation of a physical world of the play and why? What are the choices made in the performance or production in terms of acting, design, directing, and/or other elements that you find interesting or remarkable and why? How do these choices influence your understanding and interpretation of the play?

Describe and analyze concrete examples (visual or aural elements, acting, directing etc.) from the performance or production to support your answers. Provide descriptions of the examples that will help the reader see the physical world of the play created by the performance or production. Avoid plot summary; instead, prioritize your own observations and analyses and use the plot developments as support or to contextualize the moments in the play that you describe.

The first draft is due on Oct 31st and the final draft is due on Nov 21st before the class.

25% Creative Project

For this project, you can work in a group between 2 and 4 people to create a 10 minute presentation or performance. For this project, the sky is the limit. You can choose to collaborate to do a reading of a scene from a play, illustrate a costume for a scene, create a design concept for a performance, or design a professional scene, or any other interesting ideas approved by me.

Each group must turn in a one-paragraph proposal with the names of the group members that explains your project and outlines what role each member will fulfill in the project by email to hpeng@gradcenter.cuny.edu no later than November 14.

Throughout your research and preparation, I encourage you to sign up for my office hours for brainstorming, reference, suggestions, or any related topics to your creative project.

Each group will have a time slot in the last two sections—December 5 and December 12—to present their projects. The presentation should include three parts: 1) your research on the topics, 2) documentation of the process, and 3)Q&A. The presentation should be no more than 10 mins, please honor this time limit and I will cut the presentation off at 10 mins.